It cost a lot of money, but I finally took the plunge and bought a Nexus One from Google. I have been looking to get a smartphone for a few years, but it wasn't until Google unleashed their (largely) open source Android operating system that I began to salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs.

I have a family phone plan with AT&T, so I wanted to stay with the carrier for convenience. Unfortunately, the only decent-quality smartphones available were Apple's iPhone and, more recently, a couple of Windows Mobile-based units from HTC units that had been butchered by AT&T's crapware.

When Google released the Nexus One back in January, it was only available on the T-Mobile network (from a 3G perspective), and I don't mind admitting I was a little jealous. An announcement that Verizon customers would get a version made me seriously consider leaving AT&T; however, Google released a version that would work on the AT&T network just before I was going to make the jump. Without a carrier subsidy, the cost (almost $600 with tax) was high, but I ordered my phone on the day it was released.

I've been playing with it for a few days now, and I have to say that I am delighted with it. So much so, in fact, that I have ordered another to replace my wife's ageing flip phone. The phone delivers all the latest mobile phone technologies, and Google ties them together with a suite of tools designed to maximize their potential. I have been trying to get used to using the virtual keyboard, but Google has endowed the phone with the ability to convert speech into text, so I've been cheating a little.

I downloaded an e-book reader that allows me to read all the great classics that have entered the public domain, a Google application that can tell me what stars and constellations I am looking at by simply pointing the phone at them, and a digital compass that uses a combination of the phone's GPS and orientation sensors.

Anyway, I've been tweeting about my Nexus One adventures if readers are interested in hearing about my experiences with the device. Next week, I'll be getting a higher capacity microSD card so I can load a large chunk of my music collection on to it.